Photo by Joanne Beck.
While working as manager of Stafford Country Club a year and a half ago, Lynn Garlock first heard that the Pennysaver in Le Roy was being sold, and she and husband Scott shared their interest as prospective proprietors.
Owned by David and Danette Grayson for over 40 years, the weekly publication and printing company LP Graphics appealed to the Garlock couple and their son Tommy. However, that idea didn’t go anywhere for the next several months until the topic came back around in December of 2023, Scott said.
“So we just kind of put it on the back burner, like, we'll see. And it went a solid year, because it kind of got to where we kind of forgot about it until this past December. I found out by accident that they were going to be more than likely shutting down. So I called David and said, Hey, if you want to talk, we'll talk again, this is probably around the holidays. They wanted to retire. I mean, they're at that point, after 40 years, it was time to to call it. So they were interested in moving the business and moving it along,” he said. “So after the first of the year is when we started a little bit of back and forth. This was all taking place in the end of January, beginning of February. And by mid-February, it was accepted.”
That successful negotiation for LP Graphics put the Garlocks into the fourth generation of a family printing business that began with Scott’s grandfather in 1955. While the Pennysaver shut down, the Garlocks opened LP Graphics on March 1 and wanted to retain the name based on its longtime reputation and symbolic G of graphics to also stand for Garlock.
“It’s the same, other than the Pennysaver is gone. The product is the same, we do apparel screen printing and embroidery, promotional products, traditional printing, checks, full color printing, brochures, and sales collateral,” Scott said. “There are only a few things we won’t do, like wraps for cars.”
Tommy is the fourth generation of Garlock men to be involved in this type of business. He will handle sales and customer service, and “I bring joy to the office,” he said.
He oversees a portion of the ground floor that is devoted to Emergency Pride, a realization of something he’s wanted to do for the last several years to supply job shirts and other related items, such as jackets, hoodies, duffle bags, coolers, coffee mugs, koozies, hats, you name it, for fire departments and emergency responder units in Genesee and surrounding counties.
“Ever since 2015, I wanted to start my own company; I’ve been doing it on the side,” he said.
Creating their own designs of flags and logos, plus helping departments create their own designs is near and dear to his and dad Scott’s heart — they each serve as volunteer firefighters, with Tommy at Pavilion and Scott at the town of Batavia fire departments.
The company has a staff of four, including an embroidery artist, graphic artist, screen printer/social media manager, Tommy, and Scott as president. Lynn plans to help out when she can during golf season and then move over to work full-time during winter.
The brick building at 1 Church St., Le Roy, is enormous at 16,000 square feet and four floors deep, with two floors beneath the ground floor. One floor up is used for production, and one floor below is where they burn all the screens, Tommy said.
The name S.C. Wells is on the wall, indicating it was once used to make pharmaceuticals, and Brown Manufacturing took over at some point to make rat poison before the site became known as host to the Pennysaver for the last four decades.
The family has garnered plenty of experience as entrepreneurs, dating back to the late 1980s when Scott began working for his father at a print shop on Center Street in Batavia, and eventually moving a version of the business into his home, closing in 2004.
“I still saw my customers, but as a distributor, a broker, to maintain something. I've never stopped that. That's been going ever since in some fashion, even to this day, I mean, up until we started this. And then the fire departments and emergency services started becoming more and more what we were doing. And again, right out of the house, that was starting to become more and more what we were doing,” he said. “But again, then we were just planning, working, continuing that and trying to build that business up, when all of a sudden I get this phone call or I get the message that they're selling or they're closing. So that kind of changed things just like that.”
He and Lynn launched Grugnale’s Italian Market and Deli on Jackson Street in Batavia, and closed it in 2009 in lieu of Kravings, a cafe in Valu Plaza on the west end of the city. Three years later, on Thanksgiving eve, a beleaguered Scott was manning the shop, which was bustling, he said, but “it just wasn’t going the way I wanted.”
He had no idea earlier that day the decision he would end up making, he said.
“I went to the back room and decided to close. I told the employees ‘we’re done,’” he said.
He has been working at Sherwin Williams since 2016, and is now back in the driver’s seat, which, as any business owner knows, brings its share of anxiety along with the excitement.
I’m used to this, but it’s tough; it brings me back to the restaurant days when there was a lot of money going out, and I’m sure hoping it’s gonna come back, because, again, we jumped into it quick,” he said, sharing about the transition from the Graysons. “So in addition to trying to like pause, get orders ready for customers and take care of them. One day, it was their business and they were billing, the very next day we were here. And it was kind of funny because I think someone came in, and they were kind of joking, ‘Well that's your customer now.’”
Lynn added that “They were absolutely amazing to work with, it was a nice transition” as Scott finished the thought with “It was almost like flipping a light switch.”
Hours are 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. Monday through Friday. For more information, call 585-768-2201.
